2 Questions to Stimulate Your Preaching Creativity

When someone on staff asks, “what are you doing for your next sermon series?” they are met with a blank stare.

This happens to preachers of all stripes. Verse-by-verse expositors run into this wall when it’s time to figure out the ‘next book to preach.’ Topical preachers – who can still be expositors if they choose – hit a dry spell when they can’t read the ‘signs of the times’ and figure out what’s next. Our colleagues who preach from a Lectionary may have it over us, but I’d bet even they find themselves struggling once in a while.

The answer to the question lies in answering two other questions:

What is your weakest or least favorite area of theology?

What is your least favorite or least understood book of the Bible?

Your answers reveal which part of the “whole counsel of God” you’ve neglected.Your congregation certainly needs you to teach them these things. After all, you’re the one who’s been neglectful.

So brush up your theology and do some exegesis in the less popular books. It won’t be long before the creative juices start flowing again.

How about it? Do you have a suggestion about how to break out of the doldrums and find that next sermon series that lights the fires?

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Lavern Brown

Bud Brown is the president of Transition Ministries Group. He has served churches in a variety of settings, from small rural congregations to mid-sized urban churches to one of the fastest growing megachurches in the U.S. Bud is a graduate of Dallas Seminary (Th. M., 1986) and Western Seminary (D. Min., 1995). He and his wife, Lea, live in Tucson, Arizona where Bud spends most of his days lounging by the pool in their back yard.

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